Innovation Excellence in the Workplace – a Call To Action

by Mari Anixter

As Managing Editor for Innovation Excellence, not a day (or sleepless night) goes by without questioning myself — Are we adding to the global dialogue in ways that are relevant, meaningful, educational, exploratory? In other words, are we doing our job?

Accessible Innovation

On August 1, 2011, Innovation Excellence launched a global platform, inviting innovation practitioners and others to join the conversation about innovation in the workplaceinside their organizations, businesses, non-profits, and government agencies.

The intent and promise of innovationexcellence.comis to shift innovation conversations from theory to practice, compartmental to collaborative…from something ‘others did’ to something more of us will do.

We built Innovation Excellence on the belief that innovation is not an idea. Innovation is a profession. We’ve tasked ourselves with learning, practicing, and collectively inventing the future of innovation.

Since the inception of Innovation Excellence, we have done or tried many things. We set stakes and we’ve pivoted — making adjustments and seeking new ground for the practice of innovation.

Our top readership comes from the U.S., China, France, Germany and Great Britain, and participation from 170 countries is expanding weekly. In a survey early on, our readers told us that they prefer Innovation Excellence to HBR, Fast Company and other publications.

We credit this growth to the fact that innovation is mainstreaming, and to the quality of our contributors who focus on exploring and sharing what they’ve discovered as innovators about Innovation Excellence in the workplace.

Call To Action

On any given day, our small editorial team is faced with up to 80 pending articles from our members and twice that in drafts. Innovation Excellence has published 7,154 articles and as an editorial team, we’d like to believe that each one offers something new to our community.

Here is where I pause. Can we do better? Can we push our collective limits and answer: Are we delivering better content and resisting internet rehash? Are we raising the bar?

This is our Call To Action — to ourselves and to you.

Thank you for contributing as much as you have, for participating more, for caring about strong content, and for continuing to raise the bar!

The Innovation Excellence team

image credit: csustan.edu

Mari Anixteris the Managing Editor for Innovation Excellence. Based in Boston, she serves as digital editor, director of community, and content manager for the global Innovation Excellence community. Please follow @mari_IX and @IXchat

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Right on! Raise the bar, yes! What that looks like, we’ll find out. Methinks, one way to raise the bar would be for the Innovation Excellence community to come together and agree on a set of questions — maybe the TOP TEN questions — or TOP FIVE — that we think are most worthy of our focus for 2016, then see what kind of self-organizing teams might come together to strike up the bandwidth and address those questions. Some of the articles Innovation Excellence would publish in 2016 would be summaries of what various self-organizing teams (or freelancing individuals) have come up with in response to those questions. In other words, instead of your innovation-leaning global contributors tossing articles, like frisbees, into the ring, let’s better define the ring and reconceive Innovation Excellence from individual contributors to pods of collaborators joining forces on key issues. This, of course, begs the question of time — as in “who has any?” But that really is a minor, relative concern for the moment and while it may limit the pool of contributors to the vaguely worded 2016 experiment I am proposing, even a 10 percent turnout will still be significant. Methinks, the power of Innovation Excellence abides in the worda “Community” and “Collaboration”. How can Innovation Excellence be more of a collaborative community? How do we get to know each other better, dissolve imagined boundaries, connect on a more personal level and, ultimately, become more of a force for positive change?

“The power of Innovation Excellence abides in the words “Community” and “Collaboration”. How can Innovation Excellence be more of a collaborative community? How do we get to know each other better, dissolve imagined boundaries, connect on a more personal level and, ultimately, become more of a force for positive change?

I think I can speak for the co-founders here that what you’ve described is the birthplace of Innovation Excellence. And, despite all of our work with the IX site and our community at large; our outreach, participation, partnerships, travels, summits, conferences, webinars, launching a global innovation certification program and Innovation Cities Tour, and much more…you are asking the bullseye question above…but really sending an ardent appeal and invitation for 2015.

Happy New Year 2015, Mari!
Innovation Excellence is important for Me this year because I get lots of information that is trending now. It becomes stronger by feeding us more relevant issues that we need to cope up with this fast changing world. Yes, you’re doing your job! Well done!